10 Minute Class – Introduction to Comparative Politics

I gave my coworkers a pretty long, about 10 minute presentation about unitary and federal government systems, and how they are so much different with almost no similarities. I compared these two systems by using France as an example of a unitary system and the United States as an example of a federal system. France has centralized power, laws and policies are generally covering the entire country not just some specific part of it. There are benefits to this system, such as decisions on something big could be faster prompting faster response time to some major event and etc. Where the United States has a federal government where power is divided between different branches of the government. So unlike France with the laws that apply to everybody at the same time in the whole country, we in the US can have different laws and regulations based on what state we are in because each state has its own legislature. The benefit of this is that local government (each state) can manage policies to meet the specific needs of their population. My coworkers already knew this topic since all of them are a lot older than me. So we just had a great time talking about it for the rest of the work day. This class taught me on how to speak in front of a large audience and how to have a discussion afterward.

I gave myself 10 points for this assignment.

One Comment

Shawna M. Brandle (she/her)

December 14, 2024 at 12:44 pm

Very well done Dzmitry! One note- when you talk about federal vs. unitary, you don’t want to use branches.
We usually refer to branches of government as the legislative, executive (or legislative-executive in parliamentary systems), and judicial- which exist in both federal and unitary countries, and in multiple levels in the federal ones (think, for example, of the US Congress and the New York State Legislature). We didn’t get to get into it in our class, but there’s even more variation than it initially seems, since not all federal countries divide the power similarly (classic examples include symmetric vs. asymmetric federalism, and there’s also new work showing how some unitary countries do end up doing some functional federalism, in their delegation to local governments or semi-autonomous regions). I agree with your self-grading completely.

Shawna M. Brandle (she/her)

December 14, 2024 at 12:44 pm

Very well done Dzmitry! One note- when you talk about federal vs. unitary, you don’t want to use branches.
We usually refer to branches of government as the legislative, executive (or legislative-executive in parliamentary systems), and judicial- which exist in both federal and unitary countries, and in multiple levels in the federal ones (think, for example, of the US Congress and the New York State Legislature). We didn’t get to get into it in our class, but there’s even more variation than it initially seems, since not all federal countries divide the power similarly (classic examples include symmetric vs. asymmetric federalism, and there’s also new work showing how some unitary countries do end up doing some functional federalism, in their delegation to local governments or semi-autonomous regions). I agree with your self-grading completely.